Experiments in Aural Attention II: Vibrant Practice

 

 

In 2013, three artists, Naomi Heath, Jane Lloyd-Francis, and I under the name, Performance-in Practice (PiP), met on a weekly basis at Aberystwyth Arts Centre in Wales to share and engage in developing practice as research. Each of us had a common interest and passion for walking, the Welsh landscape, and perception. After an initial number of weeks sharing practical tasks and materials, we embarked together on Listening to Water.

 

Heath, Lloyd-Francis, and I spent several months locating and visiting ancient well sites in Ceredigion and Powys, counties in Mid West Wales. The visits included trips to Ffynnon Badarn (Saint Badarn’s Well), Llanafan Fawr, Ffynnonau Penegeoes, Ffynon Tyfi and St Cadfan’s. The practice investigated sensory connections to the landscape and questioned how a listening practice might inform our sense of place. In the practical explorations I sought to explore how listening, as a practice, can move away from solely being conducted by the ear to be a practice undertaken with the whole body. I wanted to explore how attention is shaped by resonances, vibrations, and forms of intuition. I describe this as a vibrant practice.

This mode of working describes a form of attention shaped by attitudes that are cultivated over time and sensitive to the landscape, to found objects, and to natural phenomena observed by each of us on each site visit. This position is informed by political theorist and philosopher Jane Bennett who, writing on vital materialism, states, ‘an anthropomorphic element in perception can uncover a whole world of resonances and resemblances — sounds and sights that echo and bounce far more than would be possible were the universe to have a hierarchical structure’ (2010: 99). 

 

This horizontal position incorporates an awareness of how inanimate and animate entities are entangled, and informs the approach taken by the three of us recognizing, following Spinoza, that all things are animate ‘albeit in different degrees’ (cited in Bennett 2010: 5).

 

By attuning to the landscape, and to our bodies’ response to what we encounter, we also aim to cultivate a historiographic sensing inspired by Diane Ackerman’s writing in A Natural History of the Senses, who writes, ‘What is most amazing is not how our senses span distance or cultures, but how they span time. Our senses connect us intimately to the past, connect us in ways that most of our cherished ideas never could' (1991: xvi).

Such pasts are never uncomplicated as evident in human geographer Kathleen Stewart’s writing on the post-industrial landscapes of West Virginia. Stewart invites the reader of ‘An Occupied Place’ to ‘[i]magine a place grown intensely local in the face of loss, displacement, exile, and a perpetually deferred desire to return always already lost or still ahead, just beyond reach’ (1996: 16). 

 

Elsewhere in her writing Stewart underscores the importance of poetics for evoking an essence of the ‘things that happen’ (2008: 78) to avoid banalizing the complex critical textures found in the nuances of daily ongoings by alluding to abstract, unspecific, and distant (or grandiose) explanations. Whilst micro-observations of an attitude, an atmosphere, and the circulation of affect are inevitably caught up in macro shifts occurring as industrial activities wane, palpable shifts, signs, and fleeting moments all deserve due attention and analysis. 

 

For the installation, as part of the exhibition at Aberystwyth School of Art Gallery in the context of ‘Experiments in Aural Attention: Lingering Longer & Listening Away’ (2015) I made an audio track using field recordings and text generated whilst Lloyd-Francis, Heath and I undertook the vibrant practice. The audio track played through a submerged transducer speaker, the type habitually used in spas to pipe soothing music to bathers, this caused the upper layer of the water to produce a ripple. Certain sounds, when played through the speaker, such as plosives and fricatives, generate a greater vibrational force agitating the water on the surface.

 

A vibrant practice is responsive, requiring each of us to be open to the environment, and to what we might find on each of our excursions, leaving behind any preconceptions. The communication of feelings and sensations, detected on each walk undertaken was a core element in this work. 

 

Finally, a vibrant practice is committed to an exploration of the limits and possibilities of perceptive faculties, via performance, to poetic/performative writing registers. Following each excursion, dedicated studio time enabled the three of us to embark on an exploration of materials; dried leaves, green moss, sticks, water, poetic writing, and movement to share the limits and possibilities of our encounters. This echoes the sentiments of writer and dramaturg Matthew Goulish who, in reference to the presence of the extraordinary within the ordinary, states how ‘performance figures in our dialogue as a set of practices that enact, or reenact, or articulate duration’s multiplicity as live or as lived: to show us that an extension of the faculties of perception is possible; possibility, let us say, that allows space of mind, or at the very least, latitude’ (2009: 132).

 

To this end, in the writing that follows, the third person is deployed to emulate the plurality of perspectives and perceptive accounts generated whilst also putting some critical distance on the practice and shifting the register from what might otherwise read as an autobiographical or personal account.